Contraceptive Chaos: Theirs, Ours

Published: May 5, 1990

Humankind has survived famine, pestilence and innumerable battles. But according to the World Population Committee, another kind of disaster could lie ahead, unless population growth stabilizes in the 21st century.

There are now about 5.3 billion people in the world. That number, the committee says, could triple 100 years from now. It's obviously hasty to predict, in Malthusian fashion, that the world won't be able to feed those multitudes. But it nevertheless makes good sense for wealthier nations to join now to make birth control universally available.

In many places there's already a clear desire to plan for the future, even if the means are not always available. Some 62 countries, with 58 percent of the world's population, are on their way to stabilizing their population growth. But in 45 others, among them Haiti, Pakistan, the Sudan and the Ivory Coast, the population is doubling every 24 years.

Developing countries are spending $3.2 billion for family planning activities; they could probably spend more. But they can't carry the burden alone. The world's industrialized nations, the committee says, should pick up the slack - by upping their annual contributions from an estimated $534 million in 1988 to $4 billion by the year 2000.

Ideally, the U.S. will lead that effort as it has led such efforts in the past. First, though, it ought to get its own house in order. No new types of contraceptives have appeared here for 30 years. Lawsuits and politics have shrunk the number of companies doing contraceptive research from 17 to 1. Half the 1.5 million abortions in the U.S. result from contraceptive failure. Meanwhile, Washington yawns.

People everywhere ought to have access to safe, effective contraceptives - Americans, too.